


Take Me To Church

by Flyting



Series: Southern Gothic AU [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: AU, Abuse of Hozier lyrics, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Backstory, Blasphemy, Celibacy, Cult Leader Hux, Hand Jobs, M/M, Prophet Kylo, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Southern Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-11 07:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10458318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: How lucky, how blessed, how fucking fortunate he is now to have a Messiah who answers every prayer directly. Especially the ones that go 'more', or 'god just like that, don’t stop-' or, ‘please, lord, fuck oh please-'Part of my Southern Gothic AU. Hux is the leader of a backwater cult and Kylo is their prophet.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel/backstory one-shot for my Southern Gothic AU _Bonfire_ , and while it's not necessary to have read that one first, some things will make more sense if you do.
> 
> This fic deals more with Kylo and Hux, their backstory, and their relationship.

Kylo’s hands smell like camphor and antiseptic when he slides them against Hux’s bare skin, crawling into bed behind him. It’s an astringent, sickbed smell, from the creams he uses to keep his master comfortable. It calls to mind the hiss of a respirator and the steady _beep beep beep_ of a heart monitor. It’s the smell of illness and decay.

When Hux turns over in the dark those hands nearly span the whole of his ribcage. Like if he spread his fingers wide enough Kylo could almost wrap them all the way around his body, cup Hux in his palms, cradled and safe and cozy. He loves Kylo’s hands. They’re a healer’s hands- big and rough, but not clumsy, with ragged cuticles and the clinging remnants of week-old, drug store nail polish. Sometimes when they’re alone Kylo presses them palm-to-palm against Hux’s own, and Hux delights at the contrast with his own soft, manicured digits.

Hux takes good care of his hands, he remembers from watching his stepmother at the kitchen table with her little buffer and file when he was a kid, just like he does his clothes and his hair and his teeth and his car, because that’s how he was raised. Press your shirt. Polish your shoes. What his father used to call ‘putting a shine on’ and what Kylo calls ‘a pile of vain bullshit.’

Kylo thought shampoo was a waste of money when you had dish soap, and would be perfectly content to wear the same three band t-shirts for concerts he had never been to, musicians he’d never heard, (the ascetic life didn’t allow for a lot of indulgence), until they fell apart. That was why he and his master needed Hux.

Shine is what draws people in. The smiling preacher with his brand new SUV. Shine is what people remember, and if you’re good enough at it nobody looks close enough to realize that it’s only spit.

Hux knew all about shine. Pastor Hux’s little boy had been working his father’s congregation, echoing promises of fire and brimstone with his hair slicked back and his shoes polished, from the time he was fourteen.

It is dark outside and the world is heavy and still as it languishes in that interminable stretch between very late and very early. The cicadas are out in force, warring with the crickets to be the noisiest damn things in the blackness outside. It’s proper country darkness, all the way out here at the end of the gravel road where Kylo and his master dwelled. The kind that swallows you up, makes you think you must have been struck blind.

Buzzing and chirping and warm, sticky air drifts in where they’ve opened the window to offset the lack of A/C in the derelict old mansion. The master didn’t indulge in pointless luxuries- not for himself or his chosen son. Hux was sweating a little, even sleeping under nothing but a thin cotton sheet.

Kylo’s clever hands trace the shape of Hux under the sheet, rubbing idly up and down his pale chest and vulnerable belly like a man trying to re-familiarize himself with something that’s been lost. He gets like that sometimes when he is with the master too much- lost in his own mind. In the dark bedroom, Kylo sighs through his nose, tired, hair making an inky black halo on the pale cotton of the pillowcase. Kylo is beautiful, in his strange, uneven way, and Hux wouldn’t trade him for the world.

“Stay,” Hux mutters, voice gravel-rough from sleep. He knows, even as he says it what the answer will be, but he tries anyway. “Rest. You’re tired.”

 

“I can’t.”

The apologetic skim of knuckles over his bare ribs makes Hux suck in a tight little breath, but he lays still and allows himself to be caressed. Another hour and Kylo will have to leave again. Every hour, on the hour. Like clockwork through the night. Hux doesn’t understand how he ever gets any sleep.

But the master needs tending and Kylo, with his healer’s hands and his sleep-ringed eyes, is the only one who can do it.

There are so many things that only Kylo can do.

Bring Hux from the depths of sleep to sighing, stretching, aching wakefulness with just his hands is only one of them.

“You smell good,” Kylo mutters, low, rubbing his prominent nose against Hux’s hair. Hux knows he stinks like summer sweat and restless sleep from tossing under the sheets but his mouth pulls into a tight smile at the flattery anyway. It’s a distraction Kylo wants now, not rest. Precious boy.  
  
The words, mixed with the feel of those hands pressing, warm and insistent, at the small of his back make him shiver. A callus scratches at the soft skin over his hipbone as Kylo’s hands venture into new territory, and Hux doesn’t bother to bite back a moan.

When he was a little boy, Pastor Hux’s son used to pray to Jesus every night.

_Help me be good enough, please just this once, make me strong enough, help me be smart, punish those who hurt me, make these feelings stop-_

By the time he was eleven he’d realized that nobody was listening. He’d still knelt at the end of his bed every night and said his _now I lay me down to sleeps_ , pressed his hands together and furrowed his brow sitting in the pew on Sunday, because, like daddy said, you put a good shine on it and nobody can tell the difference. But God had gone away and left the answering machine on, but he sure as shit wasn’t checking his messages.

How lucky, how blessed, how fucking fortunate he is now to have a Messiah who answers every prayer directly. Especially the ones that go 'more', or 'god just like that, don’t stop-' or, ‘please, lord, fuck oh please-'  
  
When he arcs his neck, that silent plea is answered with sharp teeth and wicked tongue right where he’s been aching for them. Kylo growls, low and dangerous, right under his ear, just the way he knows makes Hux’s legs fall open. If it’s his body, his acquiescence, that’s needed, well, Hux is humbled to serve the lord.  
  
How many men can say they’ve seen firsthand the power of their savior? That they’ve touched it, felt it on their tongue and in their veins. He can feel it right now. The air in the room tenses, building tight with Kylo’s arousal. It reminds him of the electricity in the air just before a summer storm; all that power waiting to be unleashed. It’s intoxicating. Where he leans over Hux, his hair smells like ozone and, faintly, like Ajax.  
  
One of those healer’s hands finds Hux’s where it is twisted up in the front of Kylo’s wash-worn black t-shirt. Long, deft fingers encircle his wrist and pin it to the pillow. There’s a gleam in Kylo’s dark eyes, something wicked. He’s seen those hands start fires with a gesture before, and half believes Kylo’s doing it to him now. The pale skin under Kylo’s palms seems to be burning up from the inside.  
  
“What do you say?”  
  
“Please,” Hux breathes. Still, Kylo takes his time, whiling away the scant minutes they have together. His palm is warm on Hux’s sternum, flat over where his heart is beating rabbit-quick there, underneath bone and wiry flesh. “Please, Kylo, please-“  

A callused hand moves over his pectoral and then skims down the concave little hollow of his belly, fingertips tripping over his naval. He can still faintly smell the camphor on Kylo’s skin.

“So soft… You know what I want to hear.”  
  
Hux resists, spinning it out, giving Kylo his sorely-needed distraction, until that hand slides down and begins taking him apart with quick, tight strokes, and then he is babbling, panting, twisting against Kylo’s iron grip on his wrist, “Oh fuck, oh jesus, fuck, just- that, like that, oh lord, oh Christ please-“  
  
Kylo was a funny little thing. He would shrink up on himself, broad shoulders inching up towards his childishly overlarge ears, when Hux spoke of him as their prophet, but here in the quiet darkness of the little bedroom Hux has claimed for himself in their master’s home, he lapped up the platitudes and prayers like any earnest savior. Or maybe he just liked to hear Hux blaspheme while he came, the awful man.  
  
When he drifts back down from his orgasm, Hux finds Kylo sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to him, still fully dressed. He won’t touch himself. He never did. The ascetic life doesn’t allow for indulgences.    
  
Kylo got something else entirely out of their encounters.  
  
There’s a soft sound and then Hux can sense light flickering around the edges of Kylo’s bent form. When he sits up to get a better look, there is a perfect ball of flame cupped in Kylo’s palms. It’s bigger, brighter, than last time Hux saw this particular trick. Kylo stares at it, entranced, his hair hanging in lank tendrils around his shadowed face.  
  
“It barely hurts now.”  
  
When Kylo parts his cupped hands the flame splits into two. He twirls one hand idly and the fire moves with him, hovering just above the skin. A miracle fit for kings in Hux’s a shabby little guest bedroom.  
  
“You’re getting better at that.” Hux leans forward to kiss his shoulder. He remembers when just controlling the fire would leave Kylo's knees shaking.  
  
“It isn’t mine. It’s yours- ours. I can only do it like this when you’re here.”  
  
“Well, it’s beautiful.”  
  
When Hux reaches out, he can feel the heat radiating off the nearest one before he gets within inches of it. A part of him aches to stick his well-manicured fingers into the fire anyway- to see if they would blacken and burn. It’s a miracle, in every sense, that Kylo’s hands aren’t blistering.   
  
Kylo closes his fists, first one then the other, extinguishing the twin balls of flame.  
  
“How much longer do you have?” Hux asks, leaning around him in the darkness to grab tissues from the antique nightstand. It was a dusty old thing, covered in layers of flaking paint.  
  
“I have to go.”  
  
“Sleep a little when you get done this time. Promise me you will. I need you conscious at the meeting tomorrow. We have new converts coming.”  
  
Kylo grunts his assent in lieu of a promise, but he takes the tissue Hux presses into his hand and dabs at his bleeding nose with it instead of wiping the blood on his sleeve. It’s barely a few drops this time. He was getting stronger.  
  
The old bed creaks and groans when he lifts his weight off of it, and then Hux is alone in the sticky summer warmth of the bedroom, listening to Kylo’s heavy footsteps as they receded down the hall to the plantation’s grand bedroom, where the master lay dreaming, surrounded by tubes and wires and things that hissed with every breath the shriveled figure took.   
  
It wouldn't be forever. Kylo's power was growing. He'd be strong enough to restore his master soon. And then...  
  
The Lord works in mysterious ways. That’s what his father taught him to say when a parishioner came to him in tears because things hadn’t worked out. The Lord never failed to answer prayers, oh no- he just worked in mysterious ways. Just like he helped those who helped themselves. Like any neglectful father, God had worked out a way to take all the credit without having to do jack shit. And, just like poor old Pastor Hux, he would die on fire when Kylo was through with him.

Hux hums a little to himself, in time with the cicadas, as he drifts back asleep. _For I was blind, but now I see…_

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Take Me To Church](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10485663) by [Bakafirekitsunesama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakafirekitsunesama/pseuds/Bakafirekitsunesama)




End file.
